Living life abroad

Nigerians love to talk and we are proud of our ability along that line. Outside the shores of our country, we are not afraid of airing our views and holding court on issues affecting the motherland. Among the hotly debated issues is whether or not Nigeria is a mere geographical expression, to use the words of a late political leader, or has emerged fully into a nation. While those living within the borders of Nigeria are engaged in debating this, those in the diaspora too are not left out.

KoleadeOdutola’s Diaspora and Imagined Nationality: USA-Africa Dialogue and Cyberframing Nigerian Nationhood is an attempt at using the digital space to explore nationhood issues. The book is a revision of the author’s PhD dissertation, which required extensive re-work of the initial research. “The whole idea behind my PhD was to make sense of what Nigerians discuss online,” Odutola said in an online interview.

“I discovered there are many issues and I choose how the issue of nationalism is discussed online. It is a book that can be read in part by different audiences depending on their social location and background. You can just read the exchanges without the theory and methodology sections and it will still make sense to you.”

In his research, Dr. Odutola discovered that “Nigerians in diaspora are very passionate about Nigeria. They want a change like yesterday.” He added that the style of writing of most Nigerian scholars look toward Europe and America for authorities when it comes to complex issues like nationhood and “I thought I could locate Afrocentric ideas about nationhood but somehow I’m still searching.” Asked whether the concept of nationhood is alien to Africans then, he responded, “No, just that there are not many authorities who have articulated the concept.”

He added, “Most of us confuse the State with the nation but Dr. Adebayo Williams expressed the idea of State-Nations for most postcolonial countries instead of Nation-States.”

Three concepts are therefore evident: The nation; the State, and the country. “A nation is like a dream, it exists first in the imagination of a few before it finds vent in text or in discourse. In the same way a virtual nation is normative in conceptualization. It is constructed through conversations and reflections. It speaks to how a nation structurally and functionally ought to be as opposed to how it is. The virtual narrative depends on external ideas to a great extent and on intuition in very rare cases. The purpose of a virtual concept of nationhood is to act as a parameter on which the real nation with all its imperfections and contradictions are judged. One issue the idea of virtual nationhood brings to the fore is that of legitimacy; who is qualified to discuss how a nation ought to be? Should the task be left to those who are within the malfunctioning national space? Or should the task be left to those who are located outside of the national space but depend on mediated communication and information for their knowledge?”

Odutola equally acknowledges the eternal debate of ‘inside/outside’, which complicates the situation in that those inside may also be outside of the system and thus alienated. Immigrants, especially those in well developed countries with functional systems and coordinated structures take more than passing interests in the political affairs of their homeland and there are many examples of immigrant groups that have facilitated change sin their homelands using different information and communication technologies to connect and mobilise and organize geographically dispersed members.

Does this then mean that Nigerians in the Diaspora engage more with nationhood issues than those in the country? “No, I can’t say that, please,” he answers. “I made a research decision to focus on Nigerians in the Diaspora because I was going to use a virtual ethnographic methods that relies more on text than on the ground observations. I know that Nigerians at home verbalize their concerns at different spots in the country. A visit to a vendor’s stand would provide enough data to do the same thing I did online.”

Asked if he thinks Nigeria would evolve fully into a nation based on his findings, Dr. Odutola says,” Ha, that’s a very tough question for a researcher without a crystal ball but reading what Nigerians in the Diaspora express online, I think Nigerians want the nation to survive beyond that “mere geographical expression.”?Divided into five chapters, the book concludes that when identity is no longer anchored on location, home and nationhood become indistinguishable.